Splinter Reeds
Wednesday, October 19, 2016, 8:00 p.m.
Harper Hall

Splinter Reeds is the Bay Area's first reed quintet, comprising five innovative musicians with a shared passion for new music. The ensemble is committed to presenting top tier performances of today’s best contemporary composition, showcasing the vast possibilities of the reed quintet, commissioning new works, and collaborating with fellow musicians and artists. As a relatively new and emerging chamber music genre, the reed quintet is an evolutionary detour from the traditional woodwind quintet with the advantages of a more closely related instrument family. With approximately 19 reed quintets worldwide, Splinter Reeds is dedicated to cutting edge composition and aims to expand on the existing reed quintet repertoire through the development of new works by emerging and established composers.

Splinter Reeds is fiscally sponsored through the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music.

Peter Evans and Sam Pluta have been collaborating since 2008 in a wide variety of contexts. Their work together has spanned small Jazz groups, large wind ensembles, through-composed works by themselves and others, and in educational contexts in the fields of improvisation an electro-acoustic music. Their work together has been featured in the Peter Evans Quintet and Octet, Rocket Science (with Craig Taborn and Evan Parker), Parker's USA Electro-Acoustic Septet, ICE and the Wet Ink Ensemble. They have performed at major festivals and venues across Europe, Canada and USA, and have presented their work and ideas at several major colleges and universities.

Their music bridges Evans' efforts to explore new sonic worlds for a traditional acoustic instrument with Pluta's customized and highly flexible software. Their instruments are at some points fused into a unified sonic entity indistinguishable as two voices, while at others engaged in violent counterpoint.

Wet Ink
Friday, January 27, 2017, 8:00 p.m.
Harper Hall

The Wet Ink Ensemble is a unique collection of composers, performers and improvisers committed to making adventurous new music. With a 16-year history of outstanding programming and performance, Wet Ink has earned an international reputation as one of the most innovative and virtuosic ensembles working today.
Wet Ink most commonly performs as a septet comprised of a core group of composer-performers that collaborate in a band-like fashion, writing, preparing, and touring pieces together over long stretches of time. This approach has led to an incomparable body of work, marked by a keenly developed performance practice, played in concert with ferocity, commitment, and expressivity.
A consistent advocate for young musicians, Wet Ink has commissioned, premiered and recorded numerous works by emerging composers. The group has also collaborated with a wide range of highly-renowned artists including George Lewis, Evan Parker, Christian Wolff, and the AACM, and has introduced NYC audiences to major European figures including Peter Ablinger, Mathias Spahlinger, and Beat Furrer.

In February of 2017, Lawrence will have the honor of welcoming award-winning composers Marcos Balter and Stacy Garrop to campus. Marcos’ music has been featured worldwide in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Köln Philharmonie, Teatro de Madrid, and Tokyo’s Bunka Kaykan. Stacy Garrop’s music is centered on dramatic and lyrical storytelling. The sharing of stories is a defining element of our humanity; we strive to share with others the experiences and concepts that we find compelling. Stacy shares stories by taking audiences on sonic journeys – some simple and beautiful, while others are complicated and dark – depending on the needs and dramatic shape of the story.
During their visit, Marcos and Stacy will work with current Lawrentian working on their music, and Lawrence composition students writing their own music inspired by the two composers work. This two-term long event will culminate in a portrait concert of Marcos and Stacy’s music on February 19th.

Roomful of Teeth is a GRAMMY-winning vocal project dedicated to mining the expressive potential of the human voice. Through study with masters from singing traditions the world over, the eight-voice ensemble continually expands its vocabulary of singing techniques and, through an ongoing commissioning process, forges a new repertoire without borders. Founded at Williams College by music professor Brad Wells, its members are classically trained singers who draw on techniques and genres as disparate as yodeling and Tuvan throat singing. The ensemble works closely with contemporary composers in creating an ecstatic, entirely commissioned repertoire. NPR declares, “their singing is fiercely beautiful and bravely, utterly exposed.”
The group has collaborated with a variety of composers, including Judd Greenstein, William Brittelle, John Luther Adams, Terry Riley, and 2015 Pulitzer Prize recipient Julia Wolfe. In March 2015, they performed “Drone Mass,” a world premiere by the Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson, whose score for the film The Theory of Everything was nominated for an Academy Award.